We also had a power struggle recently, right? We added a small panel at the bottom and I made this panel 5% transparent.
I was like obsessively playing between 90% and 97% settled on 95% and Arnav was like, I don't like it. He wouldn't approve my PR.
No, I didn't approve, don't be.
Yeah, he approved the PR but he was so good-rugged.
Hello and welcome to Metacast Behind the scenes podcast. I'm your host, Yulee Bestelef.
And I'm Arnavdeca.
We are co-founders of Metacast, super-dead, simple podcast app that's also very powerful.
And we'll talk about the positioning a bit later in this episode.
Metacast is a podcast app that's very, very easy to use but it also has some super powerful features like transcripts and you can bookmark things that you've liked or you can also share specific parts of the episode.
It's really awesome, check it out at metacast.app and we will do more product placements as we record this episode.
So today we are going to talk about a few things that we are working on.
So it will be basically an update episode but you will also learn something new because we're going to talk about some of the administrative stuff that we have to do to launch the app in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Namely, DUNS, DUNS. So yes, stick around. If you want to learn more about the shit show that you would have to go through if you are in our shoes.
And also this episode is a 30 minute challenge. And we've been talking for over a year now how we should record short or short episodes but we will never do.
But this time we will try to.
Okay, we are two minutes in. Let's go.
Let's go.
In addition, sometimes I listen to this episode. I was listening to the Abort podcast which is by Regis Liani and Paul Ford, the guys who used to do the post-light podcast or also known as Track Changes.
They always are able to fit it within 30 minutes and it feels informative and not rushed.
Somehow we never can fit anything under an hour.
Maybe our sweet spot is an hour. But we will try. Let's see. Okay, we are three minutes in. Let's go.
First one. You want to talk about the Google podcast. I think we were talking about this on Slack the other day, right?
Yes, a bit of history because I don't think we covered this in enough detail on the podcast. We were browsing the metrics for Metacast and we noticed that one user was listening to a lot more episodes than both Arnavani.
So basically we had a power user who was even more power user than us. Well, because we also test a lot.
So even with all of our testing, that particular user was consuming even more content than we did.
Yeah, we just sent them an email because it's beta. We can contact users like this. So we sent them an email and asked for a 30-minute phone call to give us some feedback about the app, what the reason it for, how they are finding it, etc.
Yeah, they said yes and we had a chat. It was a very nice conversation where we got to ask questions.
Well, one thing that really stood out to me is how they discovered the podcast. It's basically their partner recommended them Metacast when they were looking for Google Podcasts.
So Google Podcasts shut down in early April?
Early April, yeah. But this person has been using Metacast since February, which means that they've been proactive about Google's deprecation.
But yeah, the cool thing was that they discovered the app through Word of mouth, essentially through their partner, who discovered it through LinkedIn.
And I don't know if we know this person or not, I guess it doesn't matter as much, but the cool thing is spread.
And we asked them why Metacast? What's the most important for them? I'll quote. So they said, you're not trying to cram a lot of garbage down my throat.
I mean, it was a very strong language like this. And I'm like, wow, please explain. And then we learn more that this person actually liked the simplicity of Google Podcasts, which if you haven't used it, it's very bare bones up, which you can't use anymore in the US at least.
You just go there and see your podcast, you go there, you see the episodes, you play them, and it's super easy, super fast.
Lots of people liked it for its simplicity. And that's what this user found in Metacast. And they were like, how about the transcripts and bookmarks and all the other stuff that we were very proud of.
And they were like, oh, like, I don't use any of those. But also what we discovered is that they listened to mostly news podcasts.
And they listened to them as soon as they come out. So basically like, already morning, they prepped for work, they walked to work, and a bunch of these podcasts, like financial times, daily and others, they published the episodes, and they just listened to them.
But the time they start listening, the transcript usually is not available yet. And also that kind of content transcripts aren't really useful anyway.
You don't need to refer back to it. Yeah.
You really want to share maybe like some kind of news that would be interesting to someone who hasn't heard this yet, but it wasn't the use case for this person.
So yeah, we learned a lot. It was interesting because on one hand, we position our app as the app that helps you learn.
So you get all these transcripts, you can search, you can find the knowledge that you're interested in, and you can always go back to the things that you've heard, kind of share them, or put them into your note taking up, or take a screenshot of the transcript.
So all of that is very helpful. But what I'm getting to is there's not a superpower of Metacast, which is the simplicity of the app itself.
Yeah, the intuitiveness.
It's intuitive. Yeah. It has always been our principle to make it intuitive.
I think part of that is also a bit different Amazon, because Amazon's products are far from being intuitive, at least the enterprise products that we worked on.
And it's mostly dictated by the infrastructure, the rules, the design system, the interfaces with other products. It's just complexity. There's a lot of complexity.
Politics with other orgs. Yeah, politics with other orgs, yeah, you have to like, concede the button color to somebody else so that they collaborate with you.
I'm just kidding, but it's like, but it's kind of like that in a way, because they may want a certain thing.
The other team wants a certain thing that you think doesn't belong here, but otherwise they will not collaborate, so you sort of negotiate, and you always come in the middle.
A slight, slight detour here, but I'd like to discuss this happens very often at Amazon, because Amazon is very big and very distributed.
Teams are very independent. You'll often find out that three different teams are building the same thing at the very beginning part of it, right?
At the proof of concept stage of it, three different areas of Amazon have the same idea, and they're like spending maybe one developer a few weeks to try it out.
And then they find some success in it and write it up as a proposal, right? We call them PRFQs.
And that phase leadership figures are like, okay, three different orgs are building this. Why don't we consolidate this?
And that's where the politics come in, because maybe one of those orgs will concede that, okay, fine, you build it, but you must use our back end to build this, or you must use this software to build this, which we build.
So that they also get a share of that pie, and this is where things get more and more complex and all that.
Yeah, and then you get individual contributors who really banned their career on this thing, and now it's been taken away, so they want to be involved.
And then you end up this fronkin's, China project structures, this.
So coming back to simplicity, yes, that is one of the superpowers of the app, like you said, yeah, yeah, and we also got some useful feedback. Actually, let me finish in position first, right?
So basically now we have these two not necessarily conflicting positioning, but they are maybe for different kind of user, right?
So on one hand, it's a super dead simple app. What do gens say? Dead ass.
I don't know if that's the right users, but sure, let's go with that. I'm just pretending to be 20 years younger, but yeah, this is a tick-tock or Instagram reel where JEDD teenagers were talking to each other, and you could only understand prepositions in what they say.
So we need to position this as this powerful app, need as in like this is the niche that we are targeting, but also we think we can find a lot of users who just need a simple thing,
and they may never use the power features or only some of them may use the power features. Yeah, we just need to figure out how to be properly positioned this.
So if you're a meta-cast user, you can send us a note at helloatmetakast.com and give us some ideas.
And I think we talked about our pricing at an earlier episode.
Generally, without going too deep, we're thinking about having a pro tier where all these power features are available to you, and then free tier, which is basically like add-supported UC ads.
And then in between is a maybe a couple of bucks a month, add free tier, where it's pretty much the same as the free, except you don't see any ads.
And talking to this user as well as looking at more and more data, it gives us some feeling that that segment of users will also basically falls into this niche that you're talking about, India.
And I think one way to spread, like you said, spreading the basically marketing, but word of mouth marketing, right?
Another angle to that is writing a blog post and SEO through like Google search and that sort of thing. So that's the other thing you're thinking about, then we set up a blog system and you're going to write up a Google podcast comparison and things like that.
Yeah, but at the time this episode comes out, we hopefully already have the blog post up because I want to be working on it actually in next couple of days.
We need to do a bit of extra styling on the blog. So it's not like I just write a blog and publish it. So we need to finish a bit of this CSS trickery.
I think in the next two or three days I should be able to get done.
Well, you also need a Android. Oh, no, you can't actually use Google podcast anymore. So what's the point here?
Yeah, but I have used it before. So we need to write one of those posts that will be like, oh, here are different apps that you can use to replace Google Podcasts, but Metacas is the best.
Between the every pro and doesn't lose an icon, we need to see how to properly do it because those articles actually they tend to be either a company writes about their products, but they write it in a very sneaky way.
Or it is one of those articles where 70% of the screen real estate is ads. We want to be neither. I mean, I'll experiment with this, but maybe we should have actually two posts.
Maybe one of them should be like Google Podcasts alternatives that mentions a couple of other apps and maybe there's also a separate post that just focuses on how Metacas is a good replacement for Google Podcasts. It's kind of more honest.
Yeah. All right.
And what is the thing that you're working on today? Tell us about it.
So we did basic integration for subscriptions using revenue cat. I don't know. Did we talk about this a little bit in an earlier episode or?
We talked about when we had the off-site, we looked at our setup for revenue cat subscriptions.
We got a proof of concept thing working where if you have that right feature enabled in the app, you could go and pay for it.
So now it's flushing that out all of that other work that goes to make it actually work for users.
I'm really looking forward to that because that's sort of the last blocking feature, like a big, big blocking feature.
We have like six or seven remaining like small paper cuts and stuff to fix. Yeah.
Yeah. I think the biggest things that still remaining are obviously subscriptions because we want to launch with the paid tier and the onboarding sort of slideshow.
But like a subscriptions is the thing that we could not launch without. This is the last blocking thing.
Yeah. All the other big features as well as the small ones. Jenny is like killing it recently. So every day or every other day she has like new things coming up.
So yeah. Yeah. I actually want the latest things that we've introduced is playing podcast episodes in sequence, which I need to translate into human language.
So basically in our app in Metacast, you can add an episode to the listen later queue or playlist.
And if you play that episode from the listen later playlist, so I go to my later playlist and I can actually rearrange those things to our app for building this feature.
You can rearrange the episodes in the playlist. I usually drag what I want to listen on now to the top and then I sort of stagger multiple episodes one after another.
And if I start playing from the first when it finishes, the next one starts playing, which is super helpful when you are on long drive or when you are on high can you just don't want to use your phone.
You know what's going to be playing next. You just put two or three episodes and then they play one after another.
And also if you play an episode from a podcast screen, then it will play episodes in order, which I think right now maybe has limited utility because they are sorted in descending order.
But once we have the feature to sort your episodes in ascending order. So like first episode is first last episode is last.
Then you can binge on the serial podcasts, but just like starting to play the first one and it will just keep playing until you reach the end of the published episodes list.
So yeah, that was surprisingly pretty complex thing to build. It took us quite a bit of time.
There are still a few bugs that we are wrangling around.
Yes, which hopefully by the time this episode comes out will be no more. But I really enjoyed because I did a camping trip.
It was like three and a half hours drive one way and my wife usually falls asleep. My kids did the wrong thing.
And then I would listen to a podcast in my AirPods so that I don't disturb anyone. But the thing is like when you are driving, it's really hard to switch episodes.
So I pre-plan what I want to listen to and then they just keep playing one after another, which is really cool.
Yeah, that's surprisingly a feature that I don't like. So we'll also have to build like a setting to like disable that at some point.
But for now, that's the default in Metacastia.
Yes, I feel like we need to have these settings like a global setting if you want to auto advance to the next episode.
But also a separate thing. Do you want to auto advance in playlists versus the podcast? So that will take a bit of design to figure it out.
Oh, so we also had a power struggle recently, right? So after we talked to that power user, what they said is they don't need transcripts.
But when they play an episode, basically they have this huge empty screen with the request transcript button, which they don't use.
And they like, why don't you just show show notes there? So we built that.
Basically now if you open an episode and there is no transcript, it just shows you the show notes.
So the screen is kind of nice. We will keep iterating on that. But for now, that's the experience.
We added a small panel at the bottom that has like a switch between transcript bookmarks and show notes view.
And I made this panel 5% transparent. Just for the record is 5% transparent. I was like obsessively playing between 90% and 97%.
I settled on 95. It took me like half an hour to nail it. And Arnav was like, I don't like it.
He wouldn't approve my PR. I'm just kidding. No, I've approved the PR.
Yeah, he like approved the PR, but he was so begrudged.
This is the thing where it's not like it's right or wrong either way, right? It's more just the matter of taste.
So we showed it to somebody who we know to help us resolve the argument. And I want the argument.
I was very democratic and like, let it go forward.
I'll have to quote here. So there is an account on Instagram called ad professor, the guy, because it's the person's account.
He runs like an ad agency and he often shares ad professor. Okay, okay. I thought it's ad professor.
No, ad like AD, like advertisement. And he shares some cool ads from the past. And he also designs some ads.
Really cool stuff. So he shared a bunch of quotes of David Ogilby. Ogilby actually, I don't know how to say it.
They are like premier ad agency from like over 100 years old. So Ogilby was one of the founders of that agency.
So the first thing in that list was go study your local parks. You will not see any statue to a committee.
And that hits so hard. What this means is if you try to do something by committee or something creative, you never get anywhere.
All of the cool stuff is done by individuals. I'm not saying that it should be like egotistic kind of Steve Jobs, even a mask kind of person, right?
But it's more like by committee, what they mean is you come to a common denominator.
You have to be within extreme to make something remarkable.
Yeah, but in this case, if you have a disagreement on the UX between two people, you don't have any other choice other than go to a third person and like get their feel for it.
There is actually a choice on one of the reworked episodes. Jason Frieden and DHH talk about their operating agreement for the company.
And we didn't do anything like that, but I really like theirs. So what they said is they hash out these agreements or arguments like this. They argue essentially, right?
But ultimately, DHH makes the call on technical decisions and Jason makes the call on UX decisions.
If they can't come to a common ground, then it becomes an authoritarian system in a way. I wouldn't think they use it very often, but I guess in cases when they have to, that's just how it ends.
So right now, I like ours a bit more. It feels less authoritarian and more democratic. And ultimately, like, if there's more people who feel like this is the right thing to do, then let's do that.
I rather than have some sort of guarantee that DHS is always going to make the right technical call. How do you know that? How do you know that some other engineer in 37 signals has a better idea and they should not do what DHS is saying?
No, I don't think it's the way you're describing this. I think it's more like between Jason and DHH. If they have this kind of interpersonal argument, right? Because I don't believe they have an authoritarian top down command and control culture. But if the two of them cannot agree on whatever should the button be red or blue, right?
If they can't come to the common thing, then Jason would be like, OK, so trust me, it should be blue. And then they go with it. If it doesn't perform, it may change to red later on.
But I think you and I, we are able to, even so far, we have been able to negotiate quite well. I don't think we need an agreement like this, codify it. But if you ever become like super stubborn, both of us hardlined, then we might have to like specify this kind of thing.
Yeah. OK, so out of our 30 minute challenge, we have five minutes left. So I cut off some of the things we were going to discuss already. Let's move on to the next topic. And what we promised about set is the shit show up, dance.
Yes. So dance. Here's the thing. If you are going to publish your app to the app store as a company or play store, play store also requires it.
Yeah, we just did it first for Apple because we both have iPhones. Our first ever account was with Apple. I think even to create a developer account for an organization, you have to have so called dance number.
Yeah, if you, if you register or you're going to publish the app as a company, then yes, you do for individuals, you don't require it. I remember when I was doing the first app.
But then you kind of expose yourself to lots of legal edge cases, if you publish an app under your own personal name. Right. So dance is an entity. I think it's based in the US.
It somehow can validate that your company is legitimate business entity. They probably have some kind of interfaces with different states and governments because they do the world wide, not just for the United States.
I seem to probably have some partners in other countries. I don't know how exactly it works. But you basically just tell them, okay, we are met a cast ink incorporated in a state of the law where this is our employment identification number or the tax number or whatever, whatever details they ask for, right. They address.
And then they validate that you are who you say you are and give you a so called dance number, which you submit to Apple and then later to Google as well. I mean, not later, but we did later.
And that's how they know that you are legitimate business business as in like legally legitimate incorporated business in the country with the address, etc.
Quick question. Do you know if they can do this for like international companies also or is it just for US companies?
Yeah, I think they do it worldwide. That's why maybe it's so valuable to Apple. I could probably could agree with the US government in the States.
I'll just say this that the dance user experiences horrendous and there is no alternative. So you have to go through this. And I remember we had to open a ticket. They misspelled my name.
You say imagine this, right. You type your name in a form. And then the actual registration comes back to the misspelled name, which means only one thing. Somebody had to type it.
And to correct that name, there is no form you can go and do at least not initially. I think we had to open a ticket and then they get back to us within three days or so. The initial setup was fairly straightforward, but UX wise, it was pretty bad.
So then we wanted to change the address because we got another email from Apple saying that if you want to publish an app in the EU and charge money for it, we have to be classified as a trader.
And whenever I say this in my head, I hear a trader like you betray somebody. So we were like, okay, so I don't want my home address to be published on the Apple App Store because that's what this whole trader thing will lead to.
I didn't want my home address to be on the App Store, so we signed up for an official business address. And I signed into dance. I was trying to make a change. I couldn't find anywhere where you do this.
I think there was like a form, but when you go there, you fill in all of the details in the form and then just shows you an incomprehensible error.
And I tried it multiple times over course of multiple days and it was just few creating. So eventually I tried to open this port case. It didn't work because I had to create another account just for the support case system. It was funny.
Yeah, the support agent sent me a link, like a secret link that you have to use to update the dance information if you need it for the Apple developer account. And I think Google just piggybacked on the Apple developer account and just uses the same thing.
So I submitted the change of the address and also changed my name because even after there is all the ticket here ago, they still haven't changed my name. It was still misspelled as LLYA.
Do they require some sort of address proof for the address change, of course, right?
Yes, they require invoices from somebody. And so we had to first change the address on some of our vendors and then you had to wait for the bill for the invoice and when the voice came out, I downloaded that and submitted it to dance.
So the first time it comes back, I see that they changed my name finally, but the address is still unchanged.
And so I go to the support case thing and I'm stuck in the chat. So you know, just to ask for the status of the case, it takes about 15 minutes of the interaction with the agent.
There are very long pauses and responses, it just takes time. And then they tell me whatever the three days haven't lapsed yet, three business days, so maybe come back in three days.
Three days still no change. I think I opened the support case again or did the chat again. I don't remember anymore. And then immediately after that, I get an email that our address has been updated.
So basically somebody sitting there manually reviewing those things, probably making mistakes by missing maybe because we were changing two things, the name and the address, they only did the name thing, but not the address.
So this whole thing, I'm like, I don't like when I don't have a choice. Apple made a king out of dance and then Google sort of piggybacked on that. And we just have to live with that.
But then again, like you do see why Apple wouldn't want to get into this themselves. They don't want to be the arbiter of a million companies all over the world changing their addresses.
What an awesome. They just offloaded all this to somebody.
True. I wonder why there is no competition today, though. I mean, there must be some YC startup to disrupt the dance number monopoly.
If you can partner with Apple, then I think yeah, you're said. Yeah. Cool. Let's quickly go through our traditional topic of what we are reading and listening to. So how about you, Arna?
I'm about 25% left in a third book of the three body problem, a bit sad that it's going to be over soon. But also I'm feeling a bit weird about the third book now where if you know the ending because I'm now going through it the third time, there's a lot of unnecessary meandering through a lot of things which ultimately don't none of this matters because something else just abruptly like ends the whole thing at the end without giving too many spoilers.
I don't know what you think about my favorite chapter in that book. I'll avoid spoilers. I'll be very opaque here. But remember that chapter where you have a character you have not encountered before who sends out a foil into the space and then the chapter is over and then it just continue doing whatever the old plot returns.
Okay, I think we'll have to talk about it after a court so that we don't give away spoilers, but I'm not getting it. You're not getting it. But if I tell you what it is, it will give spoilers. But like after I finish maybe like three quarters into the book, I'm like, wow, that's what that chapter was about. So I had to go back and read it.
Right, right. And then I'm going through slowly the Microsoft episode on the acquired podcast. Pretty good so far here.
This is basically like a book about Microsoft. Yeah, I think this one is also about four and a half hours. I very remember. Yeah, it's very long. I'm afraid to even start it. It's like so long.
So I've been listening to a couple of podcasts because I was camping for the last four days and I wanted to listen to something that has nothing to do with business or technology or any news or anything.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a comment on Reddit. It was a separate R slash I wasca and the guy was talking about aliens and I don't know, we'll probably have to market adult content. But like having intercourse with aliens.
Okay. Yes, but actually I know someone who had visions of doing just that. So it kind of picked my interest. Right. So I started reading and then click that user. I started seeing what else he posed because I just wanted to understand if it's a kind of like lunatic or not.
Based on their other participation and other subrages turns out the person is pretty reasonable and he has a podcast. It's called the point of conversions.
The podcast power has like a little gray alien head on it. I started listening. So I listened to I think four episodes so far out of a hundred. So the guy actually it feels like a lecture.
So here is a lot of literature research. Some kind of like secretly like documents all that. I mean, you have to take everything with the grain of salt. All of the sources because you don't know whether they're truthful or not.
But some of the logical arguments that he was making about you know, shamanism being the oldest religion when people go into trance or like kind of ecstasy state or sort of plant medicine in youth states.
They encountered all sorts of entities that they get downloads from whatever from the cosmos. Right. And UFO in UFO abductions is kind of the modern sort of skin over the same phenomenon where instead of just being seen by an icon the snakes in the Amazon jungle.
You are being abducted by aliens in a transcendental state and all that. And all of that logically makes a lot of sense that UFOs are not really sort of UFOs. They're more just like different ways of interpret visions that people have.
It may sound like a bit of like lunatic listening to me right now. But the guy I really like how he breaks down this thing. So yeah, I spent a lot of time binging on that podcast because I was really interested in subject.
Is it like a narrative style podcast? It's narrative style very well produced very well read. So it feels like a lecture. And this guy, if I understood correctly, he does some teaching. So maybe that's why he's so very well versed in this.
But he doesn't actually disclose his real name. So he goes by the pseudonym exoscientist. And that's all I know about him. And he's based in the US.
And narrative style podcasts are very hard to do to it's a lot of preparation and good execution. Yes. And another podcast I was listening also last couple of days is called the Emerald.
It's also narrative style podcast, but there's a lot of music and some kind of sound effects like rain and all that.
It's also about this spiritual realm. And I was listening to this episode called for the intuitives which was published I think two or three months ago.
It's also basically about the visions that people have the premonitions and all the thing. He makes a point about how the humanity has always relied on a regular visions until the last couple of years when we started to classify all that as sort of mental disorders.
I haven't finished listening to this yet, but this whole topic is really interesting to me.
Yeah, I know it's not everybody's cup of tea, but that's what I like about the either sort of the podcast, right? You can find all sort of content that's very highly produced. And you can't find anywhere else.
You can probably find it in YouTube, but I don't know. This feels really good. I really like it.
Cool. Yeah. And especially I think the medium of podcast is great because of that.
If it is on YouTube and even though you may be paying for YouTube and it works on background, there's just something about the video angle to it that makes you feel like like if I have a great thing that I'm watching on YouTube and I take it with me in a car, I feel like I'm losing out on something.
So YouTube demands all my attention when I'm consuming it, whereas podcasts are like I can be walking or dog walking or driving and I can still feel like I'm consuming everything from this thing.
Yes, I actually like the podcast that are produced specifically for the audio medium because then they don't assume that you are looking at the screen. So they give the enough context and all that.
Most podcasts are like that. So that's an interesting thing. Like Russia skipped audio podcasting.
They skipped checks, they skipped facts machines pretty much. Somehow the podcasting went from like nonexistent to YouTube podcast like highly produced YouTube podcast.
And I was watching something recently and I'm saying watching because it's only available on YouTube. It's not cross published on other platforms.
Also, you know like when somebody starts to talk like one of the guests and they have pieces of important information printed on the screen without being vocalized.
And if you're not watching, you're missing on that. Sometimes you don't even know who the person is who is talking. If they have multiple guests, you have no idea who is talking unless you read.
And I don't like that. I prefer the audio only medium.
Yeah, that's why we are fans of podcasts and we are building our own podcast app, which you can download at meracast.app.
It's in beta right now.
Yes, and it will not try to cram down the video down your throat. So you can just enjoy the audio only production there.
It's very easy to use and it also has transcript and bookmarks. It has both the simplicity and the power features and we still have to figure out how to pitch this without confusing anyone.
Thanks for listening. See you in a couple of weeks.